Au Pied de Cochon alumni serve a double order of whimsy in New York
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Just before his last birthday, MehdiBrunet-Benkritly had a strange
dream. “I saw myself eating a never-ending mountain of Momofuku pork buns,” he recalls. It’s precisely the
sort of dream that befits a chef who left Montreal’s famously excessive Au Pied
deCochon to open
his own places, Fedora and Chez Sardine, in
Manhattan. Or so thought his girlfriend, Molly Superfine-Rivera, bar manager at
M. Wells Steakhouse (another New York restaurant run by APdC alumnus, chef HugueDufour).

“For his birthday, I decided to make Mehdi’s dream come true,” Superfine-Rivera
explains. She took him and a few friends to Momofuku for dinner, where waiters surprised him
with an order of 70 steamed buns. As dream-like as the towering platter looked,
he was only able to eat five of the not-unsubstantial pork-belly buns. “Some
dreams are better left as dreams,” he says.

Such hard-bitten wisdom hasn’t prevented big dreamers like Brunet-Benkritly, 38, and Dufour, 36, from turning their fantasies into
reality in New York. Both of the ex-Montrealers each run two beloved restaurants
here: Brunet-Benkritly with Chez Sardine and Fedora, Dufour at M. Wells Steakhouse and the M. Wells
Dinette inside MoMA PS1. The two friends and
former colleagues have successfully exported their visionary Québécois sensibilities to the U.S. Just as the duo
helped APdC put Quebec’s cuisine on the
world map by jacking traditional dishes into totems of overabundance, their
exuberant more-is-more attitude is gaining notoriety in New York.

Hugue Dufour/Adam Leith Gollner for The Globe and Mail

The New York Times used the same word – “deranged” – in its reviews of both
Chez Sardine and M. Wells Steakhouse. The term is
apt. But their food is also charming, mischievous, adventurous and wonderfully
original. For only in Dufour’s and
Brunet-Benkritly’s surrealist,
humour-larded world do you find
signature dishes such as miso-maple
salmon heads, pork-belly-unagi hand-rolls, or bone-in burgers
that have a foot-long rib-bone springing from the patty.

When Brunet-Benkritly and I meet at Chez Sardine, his “inauthentic” Japanese izakaya in the West Village, he tells me that one
thing his restaurants have in common with Dufour’s is a playful disdain for propriety. Their
places are boisterous, and that sense of party-on excitement – combined with the
sheer amounts of food the two chefs deploy – is making industry heavyweights
take note. On April 25, star chef Mario BataliInstagrammed that M. Wells is the “new Batalifam fave.”

At Dufour’s version of a steakhouse,
diners can have $130 côtedeboeufs for two
and classic sides like a grilled lobster tail (beguilingly smoky, and at only
$10, it’s definitely worth getting alongside a steak) as well as less orthodox
picks like salsify with black truffles. The
earthiness of the tubular roots goes so well with M. Wells’sgirthychateaubriands that I could see
the dish becoming a deluxe accompaniment at The Keg in a couple of decades.

If meals chezDufour and Brunet-Benkritly taste timeless,
it’s because many of their concoctions are essentially ahead-of-their-time riffs
on forgotten classics. Artists in any discipline are those who reveal things as
they truly are, who help others see reality in a fresh new light. And if the two
of them inhabit a hitherto-undiscovered dimension of culinary out-there-ness, we too can share
in that experience, not just by tasting their food, but simply by perusing their
imagination-activating menus.

At M. Wells Steakhouse, appetizers include a $50 caviar sandwich, raw geoduck “à la peacock” (clam necks served with a fanned tail
of radishes), and Solomon Gundy (potato
waffles bedazzled with orange pearls of trout roe, plump quartzes of marinated sardines and a hefty tiara of
crèmefraiche). It
doesn’t take long for visitors to realize this isn’t a typical chophouse:
Rather, it’s a carnivore’s phantasmagoria filtered through Dufour’s subconscious. One of his trademark dishes
is oysters Bolognese, raw oysters dressed
with meaty Italian tomato sauce, an idea he says came to him in a dream.

Mehdi Brunet-Benkritly/ Adam Leith Gollner for The Globe and Mail

The key ingredient at both of the chefs’ restaurants is humour. “Hugue and I both like to laugh and tell jokes,”
Brunet-Benkritly says, with a
slightly manic smile. That sense of jokiness is
evident at Chez Sardine, where he tops
hamachi with chicharrones and anoints smoked arctic-char
sashimi with “horseradish and
pretzel” (it tastes like a dusting of all-seasoned everything-bagel essence).
Buffoonery is a constant in Dufour’s
cooking, too. His herring-sauced Caesar salad comes buried in about a pound of
grated pecorino. It’s a salad by someone
who hates salads, and the preposterous amount of cheese seems like a punchline.
(The Daily News compared the salad to “a Harpo Marx impersonator … wearing a cheese toupée.”) You imagine the chefs laughing as they
keep grating it on: “How high can I get it this time?”

All of which enhances, rather than detracts from, the fact that they are
crafting gastronomy at a seriously elevated level. Still, the most important
reason they’ve been embraced in New York is their connection to Au Pied deCochon.
Whether in Dufour’s meat temple, with its
open flame grill and encyclopedia-sized steaks, or at Brunet-Benkritly’ssushi-lardcore shoebox, traces of
the duo’s roots can still be detected.

“Martin Picard [the APdC chef] definitely exposed me to the world of
abundance,” Brunet-Benkritly says. “You know, just going for it
and filling up the table with way too many things. I still love that.”

“Martin is one of my biggest mentors,” Dufour adds. “With him, it’s all about making food
into larger-than-life flavours. And the idea of opulence has stayed with me, the
idea of abundance.”

That insatiability has been a draw and a bone of contention at both chefs’
restaurants. The quantity of food in a meal at M. Wells Steakhouse, sniffed The
New York Times, is “enough to kill us.” Their review of Chez Sardine noted that, “at a certain point, even
stoners and foie-gras eaters crave a little restraint.”

“There’s definitely still some Pied in me,” Dufour continues, as we dig into a staff meal of
Michigan hot dogs. (His sous-chef also brings out a platter of leafy vegetables;
Dufour eyes the greens the way a vegan would glare
at a roast poodle, and after taking a cursory nibble, refuses to eat them.) “The
hunting, the wild game, the allure of the outdoors – but that stuff is tough to
recreate here. What I learned in Montreal is that becoming international is not
about trying to reach an audience outside your area. It’s about trying to find a
way to be so in tune with your area, where you’re from, that you attract people
from elsewhere who want to find out about it. Be consistent with your
surroundings. So now I’m fascinated by New York’s identity, foodwise. What is it? It’s always been a place
where commerce happens, where travellers bring flavours from all over. But what
is New York food?”

That obsession with identity, such an integral part of the Québécois mentality, is what makes the food at both
Dufour’s and Brunet-Benkritly’s restaurants so
refreshing. The salmon head at Chez Sardine may
not look very pretty, but it’s as messy as it is delicious, the saltiness of the
miso merging into the sweetness of the maple syrup,
the collagen-rich cheek flesh sparking with sriracha and sheer salmon-ness. It is the perfect collision between
the flavours of Quebec, Japan and New York. “You can cook anywhere in the
world,” Brunet-Benkritly points out. “You adapt to
different climates, to different sources of food, to different people. You
change an apple for a raspberry.”

That’s true, but their basic challenge is translating Montreal flavours into
the American vernacular. Chez Sardine’s
dinnertime-only breakfast pancakes – buttermilk blinis with raw fish, salmon
roe, soy and lime yogurt – is a dish that has baffled some critics (Robert Sietsema called it a “terrible accident at the
IHOP”), but as a Montrealer, I found it so satisfying I would gladly
eat it twice a month for the rest of my life. Then again, I recognized it as a
nod to the classic brunch dish of blinis with caviar, poached eggs and smoked
salmon served at Restaurant Leméac on
Montreal’s Rue Laurier. It seems what works in
one place may not click in another.

Both the chefs seem to delight in introducing diners to new sensations and
ingredients. I’ll never forget eating at Au Pied deCochon one
time when Brunet-Benkritly was the chef de cuisine. He sent out an astonishingly delicious
appetizer of pigeon hearts – something I’d never tasted before, or since. You
can’t help but trust him: He has these intense Algerian eyes, and when he’s
talking about a food he’s particularly into, they take on a kind of half-lidded,
drowsily seductive sensuality. He’s still turning diners on to APdC-style offcuts at Fedora and Chez Sardine, but he’s also doing more vegetables,
more raw fish and more technical dishes. “It’s a little more delicate here,”
explains Brunet-Benkritly. “That’s one of the ways I broke
from the past.”

M. Wells Steakhouse, too, is a leap forward from Dufour’s previous projects – there’s really nothing
like it anywhere. But even as the two chefs forge ahead, they’re bringing the
comforts of home along for the ride. Brunet-Benkritly makes pure laine buckwheat pancakes, while Dufour is serving poutines. “You know poutine means ‘mess,’ right?” he says, noting that
the Franco-Anglo dish of Brit curds and french fries, so emblematically Québécois, has become a hit in the United States.
“That’s exactly what it is: It’s a happy mess.”